Bernard Berenson and his colleagues in turn-of-the-century Florence saw how Italian Renaissance culture—its secularism, its self-consciousness, its business sense and innovations in scholarship, its ideas of collecting, display, and magnificence—anticipated, suggested, and influenced our own. By the end of Berenson’s career, it had become common for people concerned with the making and preserving and consuming of culture to think of their ideas as, in some special way, related to the view of life expressed by the men and women of the Italian Renaissance. For a while, people attributed this transformation… to Berenson himself, and this was a part of his magical appeal. But even if Berenson was not the cause of this change, his life may still be an unusually fine record of its happening. Berenson, busily reflecting his audiences back to themselves, became a kind of turning mirror in which are to be seen the dark and bright conflicts by which he was surrounded. It may even be that, as we watch his life unfold, we can catch a glimpse there of our arriving selves…

Kristen Iskandrian’s first novel, Motherest, is told in first-person by 18-year-old Agnes, who lives in “the middle of a New Jersey nowhere” and has just begun college in “the middle of a New England nowhere” in 1993.

I first saw Barbara Browning when she was naked, one hand extended to open a shower curtain, in our shared dorm bathroom, when we were both in our late teens. Barbara wore her hair short then, and her compact little body was so unapologetically whole, not a series of parts in the way I considered my own body to be.

In Visceral Poetics, poet Eleni Stecopolous' recent book on, among other things, struggling with chronic pain while trying to write a dissertation about Antonin Artaud and Paul Metcalf, Stecopolous writes about her frustration with being undiagnosable.